Thank you... I'm printing this tomorrow when I get to work.
Also thanx to whoever pointed out the print format. Boy have I printed out like a boat-load of pages here at CGtalk! They have made indespensable additions to my "3d notebook" I've been building since I started this magnificant artform. Actually my roomate stole mine along with my ryobi gas-trimmer and a eight-hundred dollar Lexmark dot-matrix printer while I lay in a comatose state from an auto-accident.

I'd just like to add my experience from yester day to this thread as I believe it contains interesting advice.

It's that for some reason I used the windows tool for partitioning, the one in the "computer browser", to delete a partition that I didn´t use. The particular partition was one of three inside an enxtended partition, like an envelope partition if you aint familiar with this. The other two were my prime data partition and my Fat partition. Saying yes to deleting the empty one, seeing it take with it my data partition as well nearly made me swear, I guess Microsoft kindof have spoilt me with these kind of surprises before so there wasn't really much outrage left to use.

The program to fix the situation was Acronis Disk Director-> recovery expert, at the "complete setting" and waiting for a while. Some other program found old changed partitions, if you arrive at this situation check for correct size/amount of empty space at your final solution. If you recover the wrong partition you will likely write over the deleted data in the partition table and loose file data as well.

Finally, if you get into serious trouble that has to do with partitioning, partition table corruption or other non hardware loss of data, I would like to recommend this guy from Denmark;

His free utilities is in my experience the best and definetely safest tools there is for this situation, I had him send me .bat files for a much worse situation I had earlier on and it was a matter of hours before I had everything out of the computer, and then the problems with the fudged partitions fixed as well.

Please help I tried to install some more ram to my system this morning which it wouldnt accept and now my harddisk with all my 3d on it (4 years worth) is saying "file system corrupt" when I try to access it and in the properties for this drive its saying the disk is empty...It looks like the new ram has damaged my harddisks file system...Is this fixable ive just been trying to find some software to access the drive but theres so much out there and I dont want to cause any further damage just in case the problem Im having is fixable....

i dont know about your hard drive partitionning
if you have an empty space ton install a temporary windows
of if you have a way to brought your disk into a friend computer
there's a soft called getbackdata for ntfs (runtime software www.runtime.org )
that works quite fine. it helps me restore about 6GB of disappeared
partitions ( no more MFT -__- ) so dont get hopeless
theres a demo on the website, but its limited in term of Bytes that can be restored.
but if your really in a hurry you can find a way on the donkey...
sorry for saying this coz its not quite good, i know.

if an admin find this misplaced he can delete this sentence of course.

Since this seems related so I'll share a tip that has saved my datas bacon on several occasions.

If you've ever had a drive that was no longer recognized by the computer but still spins up it's probably due to a problem with the PCB. For example I accidentally plugged the wrong power supply into a drive and fried the PCB. This was very bad because it had all my current projects on it one of which I had just delivered to a client. It would have cost me thousands to send it to a recovery place but instead I bought another drive with the same model number and swapped the PCB and recovered my files.

A friend of mine was using a drive he got out of the trash and it eventually died on him. He sent me the drive and I managed to find a drive on ebay with the matching model number and did the same thing and recovered his files.

So besides not using drives you found in the trash the lesson here is to do frequent backups and clearly label your power supplies.

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